Page 618 - Sociology and You

Riot police officers look at a fire set by fans during a 1996 soccer game in Athens. How does contagion theory describe the behavior that led to the fire?
convergence theory
theory that states that crowds are formed by people who deliberately congregate with like-minded others
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Unit 5 Social Change
crowds made up of the masses. People in crowds, Le Bon thought, were re- duced to a nearly subhuman level.
By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man de- scends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a crea- ture acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings
(Le Bon, 1960:32).
Herbert Blumer (1969a) has offered another version of contagion theory. Blumer avoids Le Bon’s elitist bias but still implies that crowds are irrational and out of control. For Blumer, the basic process in crowds is a “circular re- action”—people mutually stimulating one another. This process includes three stages. In milling, the first stage, people move around in an aimless and random fashion, much like excited herds of cattle or sheep. Through milling, people become increasingly aware of and sensitive to one another; they enter something akin to a hypnotic trance. All of this prepares the crowd to act in a concerted and spontaneous way.
The second stage, collective excitement, is a more intense form of milling. At this stage, crowd members become impulsive, unstable, and highly re- sponsive to the actions and suggestions of others. Individuals begin to lose their personal identities and take on the identity of the crowd.
The last stage, social contagion, is an extension of the other stages. Behavior in this stage involves rigid, unthinking, and nonrational transmis- sion of mood, impulse, or behavior. We see such behavior, for example, when fans at soccer games in Europe launch attacks on referees that disrupt games and leave people injured or even killed. Taking a less extreme case, people at auctions can find themselves buying objects of little or no value to them because they have become caught up in the excitement of bidding.
What is emergent norm theory? Sociologists today realize that much crowd behavior, even in mobs, is actually very rational (McPhail, 1991). Emergent norm theory stresses the similarity between daily social behav- ior and crowd behavior. In both situations, norms guide behavior (Turner, 1964; Turner and Killian, 1987). So even within crowds, rules develop. These rules are emergent norms because the crowd participants are not aware of the rules until they find themselves in a particular situation. The norms de- velop on the spot as crowd participants pick up cues for expected behavior.
Contagion theory proposes a collective mind that motivates members of the crowd to act. According to emergent norm theory, people in a crowd are present for a variety of reasons. Hence, they do not all behave in the same way. Conformity may be active (some people in a riot may take home as many watches and rings as they can carry) or passive (others may simply not interfere with the looters, although they take nothing for themselves). In Nazi Germany, for instance, some people destroyed the stores of Jewish mer- chants, while others watched silently.
What is convergence theory? Both the contagion and emergent norm theories of crowd behavior assume that individuals are merely responding to those around them. It may be a more emotional response (as in contagion theory) or a more rational response (as in emergent norm theory). In other words, the independent variable in crowd behavior is the crowd itself. In con- trast, in convergence theory crowds are formed by people who deliberately
emergent norm theory
theory stating that norms develop to guide crowd behavior